Sartre on Blackness, Liberation, and Dialectics

A discussion of Jean-Paul Sartre's introductory piece to a collection of Négritude poetry. The essay "Black Orpheus" describes the revolutionary power of Black consciousness and its capacity to transform how we understand collective identity. However, Sartre concludes the essay by calling for an eventual surpassing of that consciousness and movement toward a vision of the global proletariat. How are we to understand this transition, in terms of both its possibilities and its limits?

What is Black Existentialism?

Podcasted process pieces from my course Black Existentialism. The course introduces one of the most important and potent mid-century intellectual movements - the existentialist movement - through a series of black Atlantic thinkers. Our keystone will be Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, which is arguably the most important work of Black existentialism from this period. Across the semester we will see why existentialism, with its focus on the ambiguities and ambivalences of lived-experience, had such a deep impact on Black thinkers across the diaspora. We will see these existentialist insights register in literature, philosophy, and film. Old and new.